cover

Elegy for a Fabulous World
Ninebark Press
To order contact ninebarkpress@yahoo.com
Or order on Amazon.com
Nominated for the Northern California
Book Award in Fiction

From Communist Ukraine or an unidentified Eastern European country where Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians coexist, to a New World of immigrants across the ocean, the stories in Elegy for a Fabulous World create a mythological space in which fable and reality are impossible to untangle.

“Alta Ifland’s short stories work from the energy of defamiliarization, as some of the best pieces of world literature do. Her language is sweet, chatty and seductive, and when a reader gets comfortably situated in her world, like a mouse in cheese, she catapults her or him into another, “dangerously” different perspective. The world of Ifland’s stories is made of opposites: it’s warm and chilly, deeply humane and strangely absurd, gentle and rough, humorous and sad. Her writing can’t be pinned into an expected context. In spite of dividing her collection into “There” and “Here and There,” Ifland magically manages to protect her stories from being read as a literary “exemplar” of a national literature, or of exile literature, or of nomadic literature, or émigré literature, or of anything else which would overshadow (as it often does) the pure pleasure of the literary text.”
Dubravka Ugresic

“Alta Ifland's uncanny tales merge the child’s innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth. A gone world prospers in the real time of memory, its immediacies restored, its deeper significance coming clear like a shape disclosed by the archeologist's pick.”
—Sven Birkerts


Short Stories Published in Magazines

The Bitter Oleander
The Nonexistence of Adelaide Bauer

The Cream City Review
Milk or How I Became an American Citizen

AGNI
Elegy for a Fabulous World

The Tusculum Review
The Random Bus

Emerging Writers Network



Elegy for a Fabulous World reviews:

The Harpoonist
https://lydianetzer.blogspot.com/...

World News
http://article.wn.com/view/2009/12/24/Indy_Lit_Showcase...

Words without Borders
http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-languages-of-alta-ifland/

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Elegy-Fabulous-World-Alta-Ifland...

The Redwood Coast Review
http://www.stephenkessler.com/rcr/rcr_2010spr.pdf/

The Agony Column
http://trashotron.com/agony/news/2009/12-28-09-news.htm

Library Thing
http://www.librarything.com/work/9076358/reviews

Goodreads
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...

The Nervous Breakdown
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/dlam/2010/05/love-squalor-passports-to-the-past/

The Rumpus
http://therumpus.net/2010/04/i-know-why-the-caged-bear-sings/

The Short Review
http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/AltaIfland...

Rain Taxi
https://www.raintaxi.com/elegy-for-a-fabulous-world/

Gently Read Literature
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/...

91st Meridian
http://iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol7-num2/ania-spyra-reviews-alta...




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